Rammstein - untitled

As soon as it was confirmed for 2019, Rammstein’s seventh studio album was always going to be one of the biggest metal releases of the year, if not the biggest, and it was actually nice to see the band use that to their advantage and give the album a worthily ceremonial roll-out. The promotion alone was a welcome return to times when big artists generally put more effort into their album promo cycles. I get that it got a little overdone in its time, and I get that not every artist has at their disposal the means to give their upcoming records the kind of red carpet treatment that Rammstein has given theirs. And sudden/short-notice, unprecedented album drops have been a cool way for artists to show their confidence in their work and reputation to build their own hype on exactly that suddenness. But in a day and age where sudden project releases carry much less surprise factor now and seem more to be symptomatic of short attention spans and capitalizing on a trend, Rammstein’s more magnificent promotional phase for their first album in a decade was a nice change of pace, for me at least. From the incrementally released trailers and teasers for each song, the big broadcast of the single “Radio”, to cryptic early social media messages and the delay of the very reveal of the title (or lack thereof) and cover art, Rammstein did a lot to take advantage of their ability to give their album a more committed old-school promotion when few else were doing so. Whereas the once brave, sudden nonchalant album drop has now grown dejected and taken on a possibility to be interpreted as nervousness to hype what might not live up to such hype (it can’t disappoint and not live up to the hype if you don’t give it any hype), a big roll-out like this has once again become a real sign of confidence in one’s work, and based on their seventh album’s roll-out, Rammstein knew they had put together a hell of a comeback album. And that became incredibly clear as soon as the band released their most monumental combined visual and auditory statement to date with the music video for the first single and opening track “Deutschland”.

The song itself is a sobering, grand, sorrowfully heart-wrenching cry for the band’s homeland and its long, tumultuous struggle to overcome its infamously dark history. It’s the kind of tough, honest, and well-timed critical look that I must give Rammstein respect for making, and the huge production and ambitious concept of the music video directed by Specter Berlin do justice to both the song and its uneasy (to say the least) subject matter. It’s the kind of biting commentary that the video for Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” was so revered for last year, though I honestly think that the Childish Gambino song itself has been largely overrated outside the context of the video and that “Deutschland” is an even more fearlessly convicting song and its video and even more artistically accomplished national critique (as it should have with its evidently bigger budget). But to get into the song itself since it’s on topic, “Deutschland” is a conflicted cry for the band’s homeland and the aftermath of its darkest days it is still struggling to overcome. The lyrics highlight Germany’s pride in its achievements and its unyielding ambition, but how that pride and ambition has been twisted into a kind of malignant narcissism to produce some of history’s most despicable atrocities (with the band not at all coy about the history they bring up, with the reference to Übermensch and the former national anthem line “Deutschland Deutschland über allen”). The instrumental of the song is dynamic and rides in tune with the lyrics’ heaviness perfectly all the way through, and the resounding bellow of the chant, “Deutschland”, provides the burst of sonic and poetic intensity that makes the song such a standout track. And the sorrow and sincere wish to love this complicated and slowly healing Germany is conveyed magnificently in Till Lindemann’s subtly heart-wrenching vocal performance. If it’s not already obvious from the preceding verbiage in this paragraph, “Deutschland” is undoubtedly going to be near or at the top of my song list at the end of this year.

Moving on from my favorite song of 2019 so far, the second single and second track on the album, “Radio”, which had a similarly big release, is possibly the catchiest song on the album with its groovy guitar riff, its keyboard sprinkling on top, and its fittingly infectious chorus. The song is another example of what I think is one of Rammstein’s most overlooked traits, and that is Till Lindemann’s lyricism. The song deals with an escape from life and a finding of pleasure through radio, as is pretty apparent by the title. The lyrics carry a good deal of sexual overtones, and though the line translates to putting one’s ear up to hear the radio, I’m pretty sure Lindemann chose the wording of “Mein Ohr ganz nah am” to resemble “my orgasm”. To possibly look way too deep into this and link it to German history, the band members grew up in the part of Berlin in East Germany, which was basically an impoverished hell hole under Soviet rule, and the band have expressed before their frustration with the forced insulation of the old regime. The radio referred to in the song is specified to be one the picks up international broadcasts, the wonders of which I imagine Rammstein and other Berliners in East Germany were depply inspired by and longed desperately to get any taste they could of (which the voracious appetite the women had for the radios in the music video and the revolt it led to supports).

Third in the track listing is the song “Zeig Dich”(meaning “Show Yourself), whose orthodoxical introductory chant opens the heavy quick-rhythm-driven guitar riff base of the song and its religious critique excellently. The quick calling cards the lyrics bring up to identify the subject of the song as the Christian church aren’t really much more than that, but the fact that the invocation of child abuse and the forbidding of contraception immediately brings to mind an organization meant to promote moral, Godly living is reflective of so many things wrong with the church. But the song seems to be a flustered insistence for the church to reveal its true and conflicting intentions: for its own sustenance through its authority over its followers and their passing down and around of the doctrine. The poetic technique is audibly impressive, but lost in translation, as the verses are loaded with mantras all tagged with the prefix “ver-”, which doesn’t really have an English equivalent, but serves to make more extremein some way the verbs being modified, which could be interpreted quite a few ways in the context of the song’s religious critique.

The fourth track, “Ausländer”, was a bit off-putting to me at first for its dancy beat and pitch-shifted backing vocal sample, but its lighter attitude compared to the surrounding tracks was probably a good move by the band and its cheeky fun has helped it grow on me a bit. The song is a kind of comedic suggestion to travelers to learn to speak native languages because the opposite gender loves to hear a foreigner speak their tongue, with Lindemann dropping all these overly dramatic romantic pleas in Spanish, French, and Russian. It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek, but the concept of cultures mingling and the language through which it happens is certainly something that could be read into even deeper here, but I feel I might be getting in too deep to this album’s lyrics as it is. Fun song! It strikes me as this album’s “Haifisch”.

The sixth song is called “Sex”, and it is one of those universally understood words that needs no translation. Rammstein have never been shy about putting all the raunchiest and most intentionally provocative aspects of the universal pleasure into song (Till Lindemann’s 2015 solo album also was largely about his many sexual fantasies and aspirations). But on this song, Rammstein finally tackle the queasy feelings of rising sexual attraction and the intense urge to bask in its pleasure with another. The lyrics come off, not so much as creepy or filthy, but rather as profoundly horny (a phrase I never thought I’d type, but here we are), with Lindemann singing “Wir leben bei sex”, which means “we live during sex”, which could be interpreted as an ode to the pleasure of the act of reproduction. The boisterous vocal delivery of the titular refrain gives the already heavy, groovy, and provocative song a different primal energy, and it makes the desire spoken of in the lyrics evident and real. And speaking of powerfully primal vocal performances…

The song “Puppe” has justifiably gained a lot of attention for Till Lindemann’s scathingly rough and chillingly tortured vocal delivery in its second half, which was the first thing that caught my ear too when I gave this album its first spin. Delving into the lyrics the song reveals itself to be about a child who is kept comforted (or even medicated to a degree) by a doll while this child’s sister goes off to work, which is revealed to be only in the neighboring room and is likely to be prostitution. The song eventually reveals that the child finds the sister dead at the hands of an assailant during her work, driving the child to bite the head off the doll, which could have a variety of interpretations regarding this already unhinged character’s stability, killing the assailant, destroying the comforting object and thus shedding all childhood innocence completely at the sight of such trauma, or simply a deranged, destructive breakdown. Personally, I think the lyrics suggest that the child rips the doll’s head off in an act of traumatic realization of the world’s cruelty and a refusal to accept being sheltered from it, with whatever actions following being very up in the air. Either way, how the band builds up the the climax of the child biting the head of the doll off and explodes into vibrant heaviness provides the perfect backing for Lindemann to play this character phenomenally.

The soulful metallic ballad “Was ich Liebe” is probably the most flat-out depressing song on the album, and despite the simplicity of its lyrics, its conflict with its speaker wanting to love but also feeling that doing so is futile and that all pleasure is fleeting is well expressed, and an interestingly stark contrast to “Sex”, wherein the raw, physical lust brings about divine, life-affirming pleasure and whereas “Was ich Liebe” details perhaps the comedown from the high of sexual fulfillment to a life viewed through the most hopeless lens in which all pleasure eventually rots and everything loved dies. The song itself doesn’t actually reference sex at all, but it is perhaps its very absence and the vagueness concepts the speaker laments over that suggest that perhaps the speaker doesn’t even know how to find the lasting forms of love sought through sex. Then again, I could just be reading into Rammstein’s trend of often writing about sex. Sonically it provides a break from all the extreme energy leading up to it,which is nice in the track listing, but the woeful lamentation makes it come off as a bit overly dramatic. Given the whiny, defeatist subject matter though, perhaps that was intentional.

The very next song, “Diamant”, is an even more stripped back acoustic breather track supplemented with weeping vibratto strings for an intentionally melodramatic effect. It’s a somber love song in which Lindemann compares his allure to a beautiful person to that of a diamond, struggling with an infatuation that he knows is soul-sucking and something he should avoid, concluding his comparison of this beautiful person to the beautiful jewel in dejection, saying it’s only a stone.

The song “Weit Weg” is probably the album’s low point both lyrically and musically, being a less tangibly performed song of unfulfilled longing for a far away woman with some juxtaposition between feeling close, but oh so far away too, which Lindemann has written about before much more convincingly. And the somewhat slow pace and minimal energy of the whole band’s performance kind of just makes it drag on. It’s not the worst song, but by Rammstein’s standards and this album’s standards, it’s only distinction from the other songs on the album is its lack of much melodic or lyrical distinction.

“Tattoo” thankfully brings back the energy of the band’s signature industrial metal groove for the album’s last minutes. It definitely hearkens back to Reise Reisemusically, and it’s a fine offering of their more groovy old-school style. The song is about the literal act of tattooing a lover’s name and contemplating the pain and permanence of it all to express the significance of their love in the speaker’s life, ending on the somewhat tongue-in-cheek contemplation that if they ever split up, then the speaker will have to find someone else with the same name. Lyrically, it’s very direct, but also colorful and a fresh angle for this topic.

The album closes on perhaps the most haunting and unsettling note (rivaled only by “Puppe”) with “Halloman”, a song about the luring of a young girl by the titular “Hallomann” (who is suggested to be part of the Catholic church when the girl is revealed to be dancing while wearing a rosary) into a life of sexual servitude. It’s a disturbing and genuinely mournful song, and the band handles the seriousness of the subject matter well both lyrically and musically with the pleading sorrow in Till Lindemann’s performance conveying the gravity of the all too common story of childhood stolen and butchered by depraved opportunists who prey upon the vulnerable. I’m glad Tue band saved this song for the end because I can’t imagine its eerie realism anywhere else in the track listing. It’s an incredibly emotive, but chilling finish to the album, and it does a fantastic job bowing out for the album.

And that’s it; thats Rammstein’s long-await seventh studio album. In many ways it is Rammstein simply getting back on track after their long creative break after Liebe ist für alle da, but it does also feel like a well-rounded set of songs that take a lot from the band’s whole career, and the songs do mostly seem very well nurtured. And while this album probably didn’t need ten years to make, I’m certainly glad it’s here now and I hope it helps Rammstein get back into a more consistent creative cycle. If there’s one thing that dampens the album’s experience, it’s perhaps the decrease in energy and the reversion to some of the band’s more typical tendencies without supplementation during the second half. But the brightest moments on the album definitely outweigh the duller ones, and the dynamic excitement of the album’s experience certainly stems from Rammstein smartly placing their confidence in the progress they had made with their sound rather than trying to make a disingenuous rehash of Sehnsucht or Mutter alone (though the elements they bring in from those albums do serve to bolster this one). And through it all, Rammstein stays true to the focus on tight, efficient composition that has made every album of theirs so engaging and digestible. I’m glad they’re back.

Willkommen zurück/10